Doing good is its own reward
The idea of karma is one possiblity that could work into the multiple lifetimes idea that you want to implement. Evil deeds provide material rewards during a single life time but you can't take it with you so that all powerful starship you obtained through black mail, corruption, and murder would when you start your next life. By the same token bringing a shipment of food to the planet of starving orphens might not provide you with any material benifits but it increases your karma, making your character in the next life stronger.
Karma could be used to automatically apply benifts, penalties and traits to each incarnation of the player character. So high karma might give you the follow traits in one life time:
Resistant to Disease
Well liked by others
and +50 endurance and charm
while having low or negative karma might give you this:
Uncontrollable rage
-10 wit
Without lifetimes then karma could work into the rewards per level system. So your karma would determine how many character points you gain each level and how many levels it takes before you get your next perk.
In this way the player is basically put into a situation of focusing on either gear or character benfits.
Evil gives a certain reward, but good does not
Quote:Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
I don't know how you'd code it, but a "priorities-based" system would be pretty handy. But how could teh system divine your soul from your actions? Battlefield 2 can't even tell when I defended a flag by blowing up an APC that was going to take it.
That's a though one. You want the player to role-play an interesting character so you reward him for that, this is pretty straight-forward (just a small remark BTW: I don't agree with good is its own reward simply because 1) the NPCs are obviously not people, so you don't really feel the same accomplishment for helping and 2) if this was viable, it would happen naturaly when no system of rewards is in place, and it's pretty obvious that in every game so far it isn't true except for a handful of players).
However, good role-playing and bad role-playing in general is a hard concept to define. But it's easy to reward the player for doing what he should do, once you know "who" he's supposed to be. I suggested a method to define different character attributes as they relate to role-playing a few posts above this one; so part of the problem (representation) is solved.
The other part of the solution, well... who he plays should ultimately be the player's choice. RPGs so far have got this right; the player choses his character's attributes, maybe with some leeway to alter them later if he wants. I don't think there's the need to guess what the player wants, when you can just ask.
Thanks for the great insight so far, everyone.
Thinking about the replies concerning difficulty curves and material progress, I'm starting to see that part of the problem is in creating arbitration mechanics that rival wealth and power. Evil gets that incrediblely high short-term reward from stealing a sword (rather than working for it) because having the sword matters more than working for it. In most games, combat is the ultimate (often only) arbitration system, and the system can usually only track and reward brute force behavior.
As mentioned above, alot of this comes down to trying to detect and reward/penalize player behaviors. It is very hard to detect fluid behaviors, particularly those that are chains of cause and effect; unfortunately, these are the very behaviors that give RPGs their appealing freedom.
What about this:
1) Come up with advancement curves that mirror and can counter power and wealth, but which are based on a totally different rewards system. Popularity, for instance, in a game with social texture among the NPCs, could make you immune to certain types of attack (because the price of killing you is not worth angering the people, or a powerful faction)
2) Go morally relativistic so that the game world's denizens, not the omnipotent designers, are responsible for rewarding or penalizing the player.
The former, if done with depth and complexity, might give the good guy a chance to compete on even ground with the bad guy. The second might help alter the player's basic motivations, as now the game's inhabitants, rather than the designer, are measuring good and evil. I think this last bit would call players to play more according to their moral code than what the game designer claims is moral.
Thinking about the replies concerning difficulty curves and material progress, I'm starting to see that part of the problem is in creating arbitration mechanics that rival wealth and power. Evil gets that incrediblely high short-term reward from stealing a sword (rather than working for it) because having the sword matters more than working for it. In most games, combat is the ultimate (often only) arbitration system, and the system can usually only track and reward brute force behavior.
As mentioned above, alot of this comes down to trying to detect and reward/penalize player behaviors. It is very hard to detect fluid behaviors, particularly those that are chains of cause and effect; unfortunately, these are the very behaviors that give RPGs their appealing freedom.
What about this:
1) Come up with advancement curves that mirror and can counter power and wealth, but which are based on a totally different rewards system. Popularity, for instance, in a game with social texture among the NPCs, could make you immune to certain types of attack (because the price of killing you is not worth angering the people, or a powerful faction)
2) Go morally relativistic so that the game world's denizens, not the omnipotent designers, are responsible for rewarding or penalizing the player.
The former, if done with depth and complexity, might give the good guy a chance to compete on even ground with the bad guy. The second might help alter the player's basic motivations, as now the game's inhabitants, rather than the designer, are measuring good and evil. I think this last bit would call players to play more according to their moral code than what the game designer claims is moral.
I like the first one. I just got Dungeon Siege 2, and I was unwilling to assign ability points until I had carefully calculated my character's growth for the next twenty levels or so. After playing Maple Story, I'm terrified that I'll hit level 22 and realize that I can't finish the game without getting back the three stat points that I wasted on intelligence. I hate Maple Story.
So yeah, I think you should offer a clearly intelligible reward for "good" actions. Changing player's motivations is, quite honestly, impossible. Maybe in a gneration or two, when we can't remember the heavy cost of failing to synergize your Diablo II character properly, you can escape the spreadsheet mentality of players.
So yeah, I think you should offer a clearly intelligible reward for "good" actions. Changing player's motivations is, quite honestly, impossible. Maybe in a gneration or two, when we can't remember the heavy cost of failing to synergize your Diablo II character properly, you can escape the spreadsheet mentality of players.
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